Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee claimed Friday that under the health-care plan proposed by President Barack Obama, Sen. Ted Kennedy would have been told to 'go home to take pain pills and die' after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

Huck: ObamaCare wouldn't cover Ted

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee claimed Friday that under the health-care plan proposed by President Barack Obama, Sen. Ted Kennedy would have been told to “go home to take pain pills and die” after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

Huckabee made the remark during his radio show Friday while accusing Democrats of trying to use Kennedy’s death to marshal support for the president’s reform package.

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“Senator Ted Kennedy’s death had barely hit the news before we started hearing calls that Congress must hurry and pass a health care reform bill and do it in his memory,” he said. “That not only defies good taste, it defies logic.”

“We certainly can and should respect his years of advocacy and work for the things that he truly believed in,” he added. “But easily the worst reason to do it is in the name of someone who gave us the most shining example of why this particular bill is so bad.”

Huckabee then said that seniors would be denied health coverage toward the end of their lives under Obama’s plan, something the former Republican presidential candidate claimed Kennedy would have been subject to as well.

“Proponents deny that the bill would devalue older people’s lives, or encourage them to accept less care to save money. But it was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don’t have as long to live might want to just consider taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them,” Huckabee said.

“Yet when Senator Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die, of course not,” the former Republican governor said. “He freely did what most of us would do. He chose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments.” Huckabee insisted that despite his opposition to the Democratic plan, he wants “to see improvements in health care too.”

But, he said a “better way to honor Ted Kennedy would be if every American has access to the latest private health care as good as what senators receive.”